Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

23 Chapter Three The line that disciplines the fell Clearly, there is more to being a captain than having an asterisk by your name in the scorebook. Ray Illingworth, Captaincy (1980) In Sellers’ eight seasons as captain before the 1939-45 war, Yorkshire played 236 Championship matches, winning 137 and losing 21. Few teams in any sport win more than six times as often as they lose, for long. The premier journalist following them, Jim Kilburn of the Yorkshire Post , in a 1950 book claimed such success was easy to explain: ‘It lay in brilliant fielding, the remarkable form of Herbert Sutcliffe, and the complete development of Bowes and Verity.’ Sellers could only claim a part in the fielding. Was it luck? Yardley in his memoir told a story of how a ‘lady admirer’ sent Sellers a lucky horseshoe, and then Sellers lost the toss 13 times on the trot; and the team ‘quietly abstracted the little token and threw it in the Ouse’. If Sellers had luck, it was that his chance came at the right time; if he had been a few years younger, other amateurs, Yardley (a more able batsman) and Paul Gibb (as wicket-keeper-batsman), would have had better claims to the captaincy. A team of lesser characters might have crumpled, faced by Sellers. Everything came right together. Just as the largest armies ought to win all the wars, so Yorkshire as a large county with many cricket clubs, and money from regular Test matches, ought always to do well in county cricket. While picking strongest teams may be a way we fill time in a pub on a dark night, or old players fill pages in their memoirs, arguably the strongest county eleven of all time was Yorkshire’s against Middlesex in the end of season challenge match at The Oval in September 1937. In batting order: Len Hutton, Herbert Sutcliffe, Arthur Mitchell, Maurice Leyland, Wilf Barber, Norman Yardley, Brian Sellers, Frank Smailes, Arthur Wood, Hedley Verity and Bill Bowes. Only Sellers never played for England. Yardley, Smailes and Wood had yet to play for England; that they stood so far down the order was a sign of strength. Yardley ‘looked to me an Englander the first time I saw him’, the monocle- wearing C.B.Fry told London Evening Standard readers; E.W.Swanton said that Smailes was good enough to bat at four for a lesser side. The month before Swanton praised Wood as a ‘thoroughly good batsman’: ‘He usually reserves his exceptions for the times when Yorkshire are relatively in distress and that is the only reason his average is not higher. If he went in at number five for Leicestershire he would score 1500 runs a season.’ They, and Sellers, had licence to score freely after the earlier batsmen had